What's the idea behind a "main" computer?

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Who can afford 2 computers JUST for themselves? My parents got a $300 Black Friday deal HP Celeron I insisted i7 but that was out of there price range sadly. We have a main family computer $800 and $300 BF deal for 4 other family members.

But outside of business jobs getting on planes etc. Who needs 2 Main computers???

Who needs more than one set of clothing?

I have a laptop that I use for everyday Internet browsing, a tablet for taking notes, an old XT to manage my home security system, a desktop tricked out for PC gaming, and another desktop to run my amateur radio gear.

This is in addition to the various motherboards in different stages of assembly that I have in the lab.

Why NOT have more than one computer?

Why have more than one computer?

Simple, a home system and a laptop system that you can use on the go. --The laptop system does not need to be as robust as the home system as far as CPU and GPU are concerned. Also, for when you upgrade your home system, you can repurpose the old system as a either a home security system, or a media center system that's hooked to your TV, or just use it as a system to do basic word processing on.

--If you are employable, you might want to get a job and buy, or build the system that you want.

It's good to have something to fall back on if your main computer stops working and you need to go online to access information to fix it.

And computers don't have to break the bank. The PC I'm using at the moment was a £30 local pick up on eBay and with the help of my trusty HD 5450 graphics card and Linux Mint I've managed to turn it into a fairly decent gaming rig for emulators, indie and some of the older mainstream titles like Vice City and San Andreas.

I pay that much for my spouse's laptops because there is a consumer-friendly price point right at about $600 or so that has remained stable for the last 15-18 years. For that amount with some serious shopping and configuring you can get a current processor, 4x base amount of ram, separate graphics and whatever the best screen tech is at the time. But they use that system for everything they do, and so it's worth it - it's the only system they use and they only want to upgrade when there is an actual need to do so that outweighs the expenditure and hassle of moving to a new system.

That's the expensive system, but it's not the only one in the house.

I build the kids systems because I can throw together a mid-level 'gaming' rig (used as much for scripting and learning programming as actual game play) for next to nothing. It helps to buy power supplies, cases, keyboards, monitors via one-time deals - or pick up systems & peripherals for free when my employer cleans house and then upgrade whatever is needed to current specs.

For myself, I tend to build (or build up in the case of laptops) inexpensive single purpose boxes. So I have my "main" computer at my desk that can do light gaming, taxes, home accounting, Internet, etc.. But then I also have a prior-prior generation ThinkPad that I've built out just for web surfing that weighs nothing and gets 6+ hours to a charge and if the screen gets broken (again) it's only $35 and an hours work to replace it. Our home's file server I built to be as low energy as possible w/o sacrificing response time (3-4 watts at idle, 15@ full read-write). And a handful of tiny linux servers that do things like read a Geiger counter and post to a citizen radiation tracking site & other weird things. And an insane quad-quad xenon box for testing parallel database stuff, because 16 cores.

I work in I.T.. I've built computers since I soldered my first together at 10 or 11 years old.

That is why I have more than one "main" computer. YMMV.

Some of us are hobbyists and enjoy playing around with computers. I myself currently have four different computers in my apartment; the Athlon 860k-based desktop I use as my daily driver that I am currently typing this on, two Thinkpad x201 tablets, one with an i5, the other with an i7, even though I don't use the i5 anymore due to it having a partially broken screen, and my old Core 2 Duo machine which I've stuck in a different case and turned into a Hackintosh. If it counts, there's also my smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3, which I use every day not only as a phone, but also as a portable computer.

Computers are a lot cheaper than you may think, particularly if you buy them secondhand, have old machines given to you by friends or family, or build your own. None of the machines I own are particularly high end, but they do what they need to do. I mean, my main desktop is fairly well specced and it can hold its own when running fairly modern games, but it's not like I have a machine with a hex-core i7 and GTX Titans in quad SLI, or even anything close for that matter.

For my next desktop, I'm thinking of getting a used Socket 1366 Mac Pro, something I can outfit with a couple of used quad-core Xeons from eBay. The newer Mac Pros are of no interest to me since they don't have a normal desktop formfactor, making them much harder to expand and upgrade. Apparently even the older Socket 1366 platform should be able to run circles around what I'm running now. With that performance, combined with the ability to accept newer GPUs, combined with the ability to run OS X without weird hacks, I think an older Mac Pro would be a great machine for me.

the idea of a 'main' computer is just that.
there is a primary computer, the one with the most memory and storage as well as the strongest CPU and the biggest screens.

it will not, however, become a main computer before you get a/some other ones.
you can have a small computer near your TV to stream netflix off of, a netbook to carry to work, a laptop to work in the garden and any other number of computer-like devices, all of which are weaker and/or smaller than the 'main' one

Hmm I have various current active list:

1 Gaming Desktop £1700
1 Gaming Laptop £2000
1 Development Laptop £1400
1 Development Desktop £400
3 Development Servers prob £300-£400 each (currently a mongodb sharded cluster for testing)
1 Nas Server 6tb storage in raid 5 for the random crap I have.
1 Home Laptop £350
1 Home Desktop £400
1 Broken Laptop (need to fix keyboard!) £600 (probably bin it)

got 3 tablets as well :S

last weekend I binned 4 all working but over 10 years old. I kept the Pentium Pro 200 though I have never used it and it works but I just can't do it :S

next addition will be a little raspberry pi project since they released v3 going to be a 3-5 node CoreOS cluster running docker. you just have to after someone spent the effort working it out for you http://blog.hypriot.com/post/let-docker ... i-cluster/